Tisher and Adam

Man, check out that Tisher and Adam.

Clever

This past weekend I visited Dylan at the Explora Museum in Albuquerque. They had signs like this to tell you where the bathrooms were.

For Nolan

Fall of a Sudden

The first day of Fall wasn't fooling around in Santa Fe. It's cold here now!

Snow tonight means time to break out a nice warm wolf sweatshirt.

Western Movie Night

It was a beautiful day in Santa Fe... FOR A WESTERN MOVIE NIGHT WHERE WE SERVED BARBECUE!!!

We had run into royalty troubles with one of the movies we were going to show so I had to make a last minute stop for something different at the best video rental in town.

Casablanca has a huge selection and is itself huge. Its massive floor space is its biggest advantage compared to the overrated Video Library. Video library has a pretty good selection too, but it's so tiny that if any other person is in there you have to spoon them and breathe on their neck to look at the shelves. Also, there is so little shelf space that only the spines of videos and (worse) DVDs face out. This is exhausting to browse compared to the more common (and better) practice of displaying the front of the boxes as Casablanca does. Additionally, Casablanca's layout is much more sane and has sections like comedy, classics, westerns, etc. instead of obnoxious and unhelpful sections like "British Cult". I often wonder if the ideal video store wouldn't just be alphabetized from one end to other with no divisions besides the new releases. Literature sections of bookstores do this. It prevents bookstores from having to decide what genre Pale Fire belongs to and would prevent video store managers from telling me that all black and white movies are classic and that any slightly clever movie is a comedy.

The better and smarter genre divisions reminds me that Casablanca is also unpretentious. Although their catalogue is deep they also have the room and inclination to stock more major titles and new releases. This means you can go to one place to rent those movies and to get artier stuff - instead of having to make a decision from the start about whether you'll be going to Video Library or Hollywood. Also, since you aren't competing as intensely against other "serious" movie fans you're less likely to discover that Out of the Past has already been rented.

Add to this longer rental times and the option of renting 7 videos for 7 days for 7 dollars (or 4 DVDS), and Casablanca becomes an obvious winner. It has lousy hours, but they mirror the lousy hours of Video Library so no demerit.


Back in the Great Hall, Oliver, Joe, and Emily help set up the table of food in the back. Scott and Levi helped as well and Daphne was typically expert at producing a snowdrift's worth of popcorn. We had brownies, rolls, tortilla chips and salsa, potato salad, popcorn, sarsaparilla, and five different kinds of sauce to accompany many pounds of barbecued chicken, pork, and beef brought in from the new Whole Hog Cafe here in Santa Fe. It was delicious.

Because of the newly arisen and ambiguous legal issues I won't say what movies we showed, but they were excellent. Two classic westerns, one from the forties one from the fifties, both featuring Mr. Marion Morrison. Hooray for watching good movies on a big screen, surrounded by other people also enjoying themselves, and eating as much really good food as you can. And all for free.

Don't Crack Up

Today at work I was loaned to another office where they just had me stuffing hundreds of envelopes. I hadn't gotten enough sleep and I was feeling self-conscious in front of a different supervisor, so I was feeling pretty punchy. Here are three things that I thought of that made my mouth start twisting around because I didn't want to laugh out loud. In order of occurrence:


1) There's a "Simpsons" episode where Homer realizes that his life is already half wasted and he worries what people will remember him for after his death. He imagines a steamshovel dropping a bunch of dirt and his corpse into his grave. We pan over his sparsely attended funeral which includes Lenny and Ned (his family is not present) to where his legs are protuding from the ground. Heckle and Jeckle are contemplating them.

Heckle: There goes a real sack of crap.
Jeckle: Indubitably old chum!


2) The part in "Draftee Daffy" when Daffy is crawling along the floor in terror and muttering, "Man... Draft Board... Letter... President... Man... Draft Board..." You can see it here .


3) In "True Stories" when John Goodman is on his blind date and tells a woman that he is writing a song, the lyrics of which he has not completed. He attempts to sing her what he has so far and he ad-libs some syllables with meowing.

The last one got me the closest to actually cracking up. The feeling of holding in laughter because you will get in trouble may be the best feeling in the world. It is the best reason to see an amateur theater production.

Summer Projects

Summer break is a week away for me, which means it's time for summer projects.

The number one summer project will be joining up with the John K./Preston Blair $8 animation course. I just picked up a copy of Preston Blair's Animation again and it was a nostalgia rush. I had this book when I was a kid 'cause I had seen it at Ben Franklin's (maybe that store was still even called Darr's then) and made my mom buy it for me. Anyway, the Hobby Lobby here in town amazingly has three copies of this big floppy book (Eight bucks for one of the formative texts of my youth!) and as I turn the pages I'm shocked at how many of these drawings I viscerally remember. This was a major influence on my taste even though I had pretty much forgotten about it for 14 years or more. 40's animation design will probably always mean more to me than anything else that pencils can make. I need to find a scanner for my drawings.

The other summer project will be to make a ukulele out of a tin lunchbox. It should cost me only 23 bucks instead of the $129 this place wants you to fork over for their ugly things. I guess I have to find the right lunchbox, too. What would be appropriate and attractive on a lunchbox ukulele? What if there were W.C. Fields lunchboxes?

I also want to read a stack of books. Since I'll be doing the same job I did last summer, which is pretty much just sitting near a phone, I should have a lot of time to draw cartoon dog faces and read. Evenings will be for sitting outside and for watching black and white movies on VHS.

I put a lot of links in this post.